Amazon Pharmacy Launches

Long awaited, implications will be interesting.  Supply chain in the era of epidemic should be good.  Linked to Prime.

Will Amazon’s new online pharmacy disrupt the U.S. drugstore business?

By George Anderson  in Retailwire

Amazon.com announced the launch of Amazon Pharmacy, a new online pharmacy service and another free perk for the e-tailing giant’s Prime members.

The new service offers free unlimited two-day deliveries of prescriptions filled by Amazon and lower prices (up to 40 percent off brand name; 80 percent off generic medications) for members who do not have health insurance. Amazon is also touting that there are over 50,000 pharmacies participating in its program across the U.S., all offering discount pricing, as well.

Consumers who want to use Amazon Pharmacy can go online or use the Amazon app to set up a profile with their insurance and payment information.   ... '

Amazon Wants to be Your Pharmacist (In two ways)

I just got an offer to do this.    Does not seem to be much different than what the big pharma retailers are doing.  No mention at all regarding if there was any discounting of costs involved.    Voice interaction mentioned ... and I am assuming regarding refills and requests to pharmacists.  The idea of reminding you means a notification is involved.    Connected with Giant Eagle for now.

Alexa Can Now Refill Your Prescription and Remind You to Take Your Medicine    By Eric Hal Schwartz  in Voicebot.ai

The new skill combines Alexa’s reminders with their prescription information. For now, only Giant Eagle Pharmacy can operate the skill, but the company plans to add more pharmacies soon. Alexa account owners must set up and connect the Giant Eagle Pharmacy skill to their Alexa profile. They can then ask the voice assistant to manage their medication, setting up reminders for taking the medicine and enabling Alexa to be able to answer if the user asks what medication they are supposed to take when they hear the alarm. Connecting to the pharmacy also allows users to request a prescription refill by asking Alexa.

“We’re thrilled to help our Giant Eagle Pharmacy patients more easily integrate prescription management into their everyday lives with the introduction of the Giant Eagle Pharmacy skill,” Giant Eagle senior vice president of pharmacy Jim Tsipakis said in a statement. “We’re passionate about making care as accessible as possible for our patients, and this unique collaboration with Amazon has enabled us to utilize voice technology to do just that.”

Amazon made a point of highlighting that Alexa is HIPAA compliant and as secure as possible. Accessing the skill requires a voice profile for Alexa to recognize as well as a passcode. The records of interactions with the skill are also redacted to protect the privacy of patients and users can delete them like any other Alexa recording. After a summer with so many voice assistants facing privacy complaints, the focus on security regarding medical information is likely necessary to forestall others from raising concerns. ... "

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PillPack by Amazon Pharmacy

PillPack pre-sorts your daily meds, vitamins, and supplements by time of day, and delivers right to your door every month. Our service and shipping are free — you only pay for your medication. .... " 

In this case:
Makes a strong point of making pharma interaction simpler.
No mention of 'assistant' or voice interaction, or Alexa Pharmacy
No mention of an existing pharmacy, like Giant Eagle handling the interaction. .... "

Fingernail Sensor to Monitor Disease Progression

New kinds of sensors, measurement and then prediction.

IBM Research Develops Fingernail Sensor to Monitor Disease Progression   in TechCrunch  By Frederic Lardinois

IBM Research has developed a small sensor that can help monitor the effectiveness of drugs used to combat the symptoms of a range of diseases, including Parkinson's disease, when applied to a person's fingernail. The sensor works with custom software to analyze how the nail warps as the user grips something. The sensor communicates with a smartwatch that runs machine learning models to detect tremors and other symptoms of Parkinson's disease. That model can detect what a wearer is doing, and is accurate enough to track when wearers write digits with their fingers. Going forward, the researchers aim to extend this prototype and the models that analyze the data to recognize other diseases well. ... " 

Amazon Moving on Pharma

The next step, the next category, in this case a very big one.  With expert comments.

Amazon lowballs CVS and Walgreens on OTC med prices    by George Anderson in Retailwire

A comparison of private label over-the-counter (OTC) remedies sold by CVS and Walgreens with those from Amazon.com finds that the brick and mortar pharmacy giants are charging substantially more than the e-tailer on like items.

A new report by Jefferies Group found that CVS’s prices were 20 percent higher than Amazon’s and that Walgreens sold its private labels at a 22 percent premium to the e-tail giant, which recently announced that it was acquiring the online pharmacy PillPack.  The acquisition promises to put Amazon in direct competition with CVS and Walgreens for share of the prescription medicine market. PillPack, which delivers pre-sorted doses of prescribed medicines in envelopes, is licensed to fill prescriptions in all 50 states. ... " 

Revinventing the Design of Rx Labels

While we were in the Rx business this is an area we tinkered with,  like the re-design approach.

CVS Taps A Design Legend To Reinvent The Prescription Label. Next Stop: The Pharmacy
Inspired by service-design overhauls at companies such as Disney and Carnival, CVS is hoping to rethink the entire pharmacy experience.    by Cliff Kuang in FastCodesign

Deborah Adler has had a story book career in design. In 2004, she was a grad student at SVA in New York, looking around for a thesis project when she saw her grandmother accidentally take her grandfather’s medication. Thankfully it wasn’t a catastrophe, but it made Adler consider the confusing mess that is the modern prescription bottle. So that patients might never mistake what medication is for them, she designed a system that could be colored coded for the patient. That bottle was almost immediately picked up by Target, and for the MoMA permanent collection; It was later declared a Design of the Decade by the Industrial Designers Society of America. Since then, Adler’s studio has been focused on improving medical outcomes. Which brought her once again to pill bottles.  .... "

Amazon and Pharma

Discussion.  In Retailwire.

Is the $400B prescription drug business ripe for an Amazon disruption?
by George Anderson

CNBC reported yesterday that Amazon.com is hiring an executive to lead its entry into the pharmacy business. Two unnamed sources familiar with Amazon’s plans told CNBC of the planned hire as well as annual meetings the e-tail giant has held in recent years to explore a potential entry into retail prescription medicine sales.  .... " 

Recrafting the Pharma Journey

Like the attention to the Journey.  Its a key part of process

Has CVS crafted a promising new drugstore shopping journey?  By Tom Ryan

While announcing plans to expand healthier offerings, CVS revealed it is adding more in-store informational signage and “discovery” displays to help customers explore new offerings and health solutions on their own.

“We did a lot of research to understand how to best serve our customers as we began to reimagine our store experience and we found that people are thinking about their health differently and taking a more proactive approach to staying well,” said Judy Sansone, SVP, front store business and chief merchant, in a statement. “With that in mind we crafted a new shopping journey, all in the name of better health.”  ... "

Publix Wins Pharmacy Satisfaction

In Chainstore Age:  Publix Supermarkets, a former employer of mine, has won the pharmacy satisfaction award.  The pharmacy with highest customer satisfaction is in a supermarket…  by Marianne Wilson.

A Personal Pharmacy Assistant

Growth of the focused personal assistants.   Named 'Pillo'.   Had looked closely at how pharma use compliance could be achieved in the past.  Consider professional advice given or implied.

Meet 'Pillo,' the robot that aims to be your personal pharmacy
This precious robot is the pharmacist of the future. "Pillo" can monitor health data, give nutrition information and even distribute medication.  .... "    by Ryan Sedmak

CVS Pharmacy and IBM Watson

Good example of an advisory system interacting with the consumer.   Being built today based on some of the work created in the Watson project,    Look forward to seeing this in more detail.  Data privacy issues will be important.   Note the multiple resources for data being used.

" ... IBM and pharmacy chain CVS Health have announced a first-of-its-kind new partnership to put IBM's supercomputer Watson to work for millions of Americans with chronic health conditions.
Watson will watch data from what IBM describes as an "unprecedented mix of health information sources" including a person's medical health records, prescriptions, environment, even fitness devices.

It will then spit out suggestions on how to improve that person's health care to save the person money and help the person feel better.

But the ultimate goal of this partnership is really pretty astounding: IBM and CVS hope to find people at risk for illnesses before they've gotten sick and create custom programs to help them avoid the illness. ... " 

Upending the Pharmacy Model

In Wired:   Design thinking it says.  More like back to the economics of labor costs.   Drug companies may like it because will increase compliance in taking the prescription.    " ... A startup pharmacy called PillPack hopes to change this archaic process. For $20 a month, PillPack will deliver prescription drugs to patients with the efficiency of Amazon Prime. Pillpack came to life thanks to a new incubator program at the famed design consultancy IDEO and the core of their service is a small blue box that organizes all of your med into “dose packets,” little plastic baggies marked with the date and time they’re to be taken. A jumble of amber bottles are replaced by an efficient to-do list made of drugs. .... " 

Pharmacy on a Chip

In ComputerWorld:

' ... Researchers at MIT have developed what they're hoping will be something of a pharmacy on a chip.  Scientists have developed a wirelessly controlled and programmable microchip that can be implanted into the human body to deliver medicine -- and it could replace daily drug injections, according to MIT.

"You could literally have a pharmacy on a chip," said MIT professor Robert Langer, who worked on the project with fellow MIT professor Michael Cima. "You can do remote control delivery, you can do pulsatile drug delivery, and you can deliver multiple drugs." ... '

Procter Looks for a Billion with India Healthcare Startup

An interesting development showing P&G's interest in healthcare delivery. " ... Healthpoint Services is a small startup with a big goal: transforming rural healthcare for India by delivering a one-stop shop of pharmacy, clinic, tele-medicine, and clean drinking water. The global branded product company Procter and Gamble (P&G) has a goal of its own: to reach another 1 billion consumers by 2015. Now the multinational and the startup are working together to reach both their goals in a newly announced partnership to improve and scale the Healthpoint model in India..... "

Data Mining and Infection Control

A piece from the ACM on infection control using data mining, we were also involved in a project that addressed a similar problem. Good description. ' ... According to Chun Wong, chief executive officer of Asolva , a developer of data mining software for hospitals, "Data mining of hospital information can help identify MDROs promptly. By linking pharmacy and lab results, infection control practitioners can quickly identify clusters of organisms found in the patient population and then administer the appropriate antimicrobial drugs." ... '